In many sensor networks, such as for industrial and environmental applications, a large number of devices may be polled by a “sink” device to obtain data, or the devices may push the data to the sink. Because of the large number of devices, though, the polling or pushing of this much data is a difficult challenge and stress for the networks. One option consists of placing data aggregators in the network to summarize/fuse the data in order to reduce the amount of data. However, placing data aggregators in the network increases complexity, costs, and management.